Transference of cultural practices by close contact allows whites to write “black”, a move that, besides the ultimate (albeit one step removed) indigenisation of the Euro-Brazilian, enables another transfer: the disappearance of the black by way of simultaneous incorporation and erasure. Black autonomous authorship (a voice that Freyre perceives as emblematic of US segregationism) is thus disqualified through transfer, together with mixed race authorship, a voice Freyre accuses of being intrinsically incapable of genuinely representing either race: not the manor, not the subaltern periphery, yet alone a synthesis or Brazilian ineffable heterogeneity. Isfahani-Hammond recognises this dynamic, and sees Freyre situating “himself as a seignorial figure who has equal domain in elite and marginal sites, displacing people of mixed European/African ancestry from the embodiment of hybridization and, therein, from the ability to narrate or speak about national identity” (p. 14). Freyre finally “transfers” the south of Brazil: a site of degenerative modernisation, European immigration and influence, and, ultimately, Americanization. It is an alien and unauthentic locale; a source of foreign and therefore distorting stimuli.
At the end of a succession of discursive transfers, the white master’s claim is the last one standing. His proximity to black commodified bodies enables authentic linguistic and spiritual incorporation, something that is denied to everyone else. Only the specific conditions of the northeastern plantation and the intimate contact between masters and slaves could produce Brazil’s exceptional “Racial Democracy”: “[t]he social history of the plantation manor is the intimate history of almost every Brazilian”, Freyre concludes (quoted, p. 134). Casa Grande e Senzala is therefore exactly what the title says it is: a hierarchically organised dyad constituted by seigneural manor plus the contribution that emanates from the slave quarters. Despite their contribution, indeed exactly because of their contribution, the autonomous agency of the slaves and their descendants is effaced, and the seigneural manor remains the unique site of “genuine” Brazilian culture. Once the sequence of transfers is completed, Freyre’s “almost every Brazilian”, ends up reading like “every Brazilian who happens to be a white male seigneur who grew up in a plantation in the northeast of the country”. An exceptionally inclusive tradition is thus recast into an exceptionally selective one.
[…]
Freyre’s transferist strategy, however, is not unique. Settlers elsewhere also need to enact physical and discursive transfers against their indigenous and exogenous opponents in order to effectively claim local versions of “genuine” indigenising cultural authenticity. Freyre’s “creolization/indigenization”, Isfahani-Hammond concludes, “is nationalistic and anticolonial yet grounded in symbolically Africanized, white dominance” (p. 52). Settler indigenisations elsewhere are also nationalistic and anticolonial; settlers need to build independent nations and supersede their dependency on the motherland. Settler indigenisation, of course, is also grounded on an indigenised white dominance that effaces really existing indigenous peoples.
Filed under: Latin America, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Ewout Frankema, “The Colonial Roots of Land Inequality: Geography, Factor Endowments, or Institutions?”, The Economic History Review, 2009.
ABSTRACT
Land inequality is one of the crucial underpinnings of long-run persistent wealth and asset inequality. This article assesses the colonial roots of land inequality from a comparative perspective. The evolution of land inequality is analysed in a cross-colonial multivariate regression framework complemented by an in-depth comparative case study of three former British colonies: Malaysia, Sierra Leone, and Zambia. The main conclusion is that the literature tends to overemphasize the role of geography and to underestimate the role of pre-colonial institutions in shaping the colonial political economic context in which land is (re)distributed from natives to colonial settlers.
Filed under: Africa, Scholarship and insights | Closed
C. Drew Bednasek and Anne M. C. Godlewska, “The Influence of Betterment Discourses on Canadian Aboriginal Peoples in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”, Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien 53, 4, 2009.
ABSTRACT
Based on government archival sources, fieldwork and the historical perspectives, experiences and oral histories of Aboriginal peoples, this paper argues that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian policy, and more specifically the File Hills farm colony, was deeply influenced by betterment discourses. The presumption of this discourse was that Aboriginal peoples, who clearly were not vanishing as promised, could be transformed into something approaching white settlers by reshaping, controlling, and managing their environments, both private and public, and by altering their genetics and morals. While the betterment discourse and the File Hills colony have each been the focus of research, no one to our knowledge has focused on the importance of betterment thought in the establishment and application of Indian policy and its significance for the File Hills colony.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Richard Phillips, “Settler Colonialism and the Nuclear Family”, Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien 53, 2, 2009:
ABSTRACT
Colonial societies revolved around nuclear families. Though they often seemed natural, universal and inevitable, colonial nuclear families were in fact produced through a series of laws and customs that regulated sex and marriage. These legal, social and cultural practices conspired to make the family an adaptable and formidable social institution, both a pillar and a beneficiary of colonization. Hegemonic but not universal, family members were privileged over other members of colonial societies, who not only survived on the margins and in the shadows of colonialism, but also played crucial roles in resettlement societies.
Filed under: Canada, gender, Scholarship and insights | Closed
what self-legislated indigeneity looks like (defined from inside-out, rather than outside-in)
A Bill has been framed in Nigeria to uphold the rights of Indigenous people there, amid a “Settler, Indigene squabble”, writes Onwuka Nzeshi of AllAfricaNews.
The Bill reads in parts: “A person is an indigene of a local government area or area council in Nigeria, if – (a) he or she or any of his parents belong to a tribe indigenous to the local government area or area council in which they reside; or (b) he or she or any of his parents is a migrant from another local government area or area council and has resided in the new local government or area council on or before the 1st day of October 1960 and continues to reside there; or (c) he or she or any of his parents is among the first to reside in the local government area or area council and he resides in it; or (d) he or she is a person born in that local government area or area council and he subsequently continues to reside in it; or (e) he or she is a spouse of a person who is an indigene by virtue of any of the circumstances mentioned in this subsection; or (e) he or she is a person who has resided in the local government area or area council for a period of at least five years.
// //“The government of every state shall ensure that – (a) all persons residing in local government areas or area councils enjoy equal economic, political and cultural rights; (b) the property, life, well-being, religion and culture of all persons residing in that state are secured, respected, honoured and protected;(c) no person suffers any form of discrimination, deprivation, disentitlement, stigmatization, or ostracisation on grounds only that such person or persons does not or do riot belong to any of the predominantly ethnic groups in which lie resides; (d) no person living in any local government area or area council in Nigeria shall be denied the right to observe and practise such cultural activities.”
The Bill also prescribes punishment for any state government that breaches the law; pointing out that the states are liable to any public disturbance resulted by indigene/settler conflict.
Filed under: Africa, Political developments | Closed
This is really captivating viewing: a YouTube clip of Eugene Terre’Blanche at the end of last year.
Yes, he’s has made a comeback, appealing to the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging bittereinders to adjust their rhetoric of discontent. Gone is the gun-toting hyperbole of standing their ground, and subtler is the racist language of their leader. Their new mantra, from what I’ve gathered, is one claiming that white land rights were acquired in legitimate nineteenth-century transactions, and have been rejected and ignored in the post-apartheid regime. In effect, they are deploying the same land rights discourse that indigenous peoples around the world pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s. According to the Mail and Guardian, this is part of the AWB’s plan ‘to unite 23 right-wing organisations under a single umbrella that can take the fight of “the free Afrikaner” to the International Court of Justice in the Hague’.
Filed under: Political developments, public lecture, Southern Africa | Closed
I’ve had considerable difficulty finding more details about the book launched yesterday in Sydney by former Federal Court judge, Murray Wilcox, entitled Kimberley at the Crossroads: The Case Against the Gas Plant. This from ABC Online:
“It’s a funny situation isn’t it, that Aboriginal people are expected to give up their cultural heritage for the sake of basic rights such as education and health. That isn’t a rule that is applied to the rest of the population,” he said.
“I don’t see why it should be applied to Aboriginal people.”
Judge Wilcox has the support of some Indigenous people.
Goolarabooloo lawman Joseph Roe says the proposal poses a threat to Indigenous culture.
He says he is prepared to do what is needed to stop it.
“There is people there still looking after the country in a very strong way,” he said.
“There is still people using it today for sustenance fletching, hunting, camping, all that stuff.
If anyone has a copy, or a blurb, send it on in.
Filed under: Australia, law, Political developments | Closed
In a recent hour-long podcast, two presentations are reproduced from a recent seminar “`Ike: Historical Transformations: Reading Hawaii’s Past to Probe Its Future”. It can be downloaded from Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond.
The first is by Keanu Sai, a man whose work I have only recently discovered, and the second is by J. Kehaulani Kauanui, a woman whose work on the field of Hawaiian sovereignty and colonialism is outstanding.
Their panel was called, “International Routes: De-occupation, Decolonization, and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” The mission of the session was to discuss the modern trajectory of the Hawaiian Islands within the context of Hague Regulations on the law of occupation, the U.N. Decolonization Protocols, and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Filed under: Political developments, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty | Closed
Upon the recommendation of Mat A., I was today directed towards a memoir by Edward Said from 2001, of a meeting with Jean Paul Sartre in 1979. Sartre, by then an old man, had lost much of the anti-colonial vigour of his earlier days (evident, for instance, in his 1961 preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth), appearing decrepit and derelict in none other than Michel Foucault’s apartment.
Wrote Said of the Arab-Israeli colloquium at which he was in attendance:
[Sartre] said absolutely nothing for hours on end. At lunch he sat across from me, looking disconsolate and remaining totally uncommunicative, egg and mayonnaise streaming haplessly down his face. I tried to make conversation with him, but got nowhere. He may have been deaf, but I’m not sure. In any case, he seemed to me like a haunted version of his earlier self, his proverbial ugliness, his pipe and his nondescript clothing hanging about him like so many props on a deserted stage.
[…]As the turgid and unrewarding discussions wore on, I found that I was too often reminding myself that I had come to France to listen to what Sartre had to say, not to people whose opinions I already knew and didn’t find specially gripping. I therefore brazenly interrupted the discussion early in the evening and insisted that we hear from Sartre forthwith. This caused consternation in the retinue. The seminar was adjourned while urgent consultations between them were held. I found the whole thing comic and pathetic at the same time, especially since Sartre himself had no apparent part in these deliberations. At last we were summoned back to the table by the visibly irritated Pierre Victor, who announced with the portentousness of a Roman senator: ‘Demain Sartre parlera.’ And so we retired in keen anticipation of the following morning’s proceedings.
Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook. I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor, and that on the subject of Palestine the former warrior on behalf of the oppressed had nothing to offer beyond the most conventional, journalistic praise for an already well-celebrated Egyptian leader. For the rest of that day Sartre resumed his silence, and the proceedings continued as before. I recalled an apocryphal story in which twenty years earlier Sartre had travelled to Rome to meet Fanon (then dying of leukemia) and harangued him about the dramas of Algeria for (it was claimed) 16 non-stop hours, until Simone made him desist. Gone for ever was that Sartre.
Filed under: Quote | Closed
